News

For the fourth time in five years, academic leaders from around the nation have identified our Overseas and Off-Campus Programs as among the best in the nation. Lewis & Clark, where more than 60 percent of students study abroad, is the only school in the Pacific Northwest to make the list this year.

Campaign finance reform is not a topic for the faint of heart. But recent graduates Maya Gold BA ’14 and Walker Davis BA ’15 are intrepid researchers, and the result of their labors is an academic paper, just published in Election Law Journal, that explores the often-convoluted world of Oregon’s campaign finance laws.

Sasha Bishop BA ’15 has been awarded first place in a highly competitive poster presentation session held by the International Congress of Arachnology, which draws nearly 400 students from around the world to compete and share original research. Bishop heads to the University of Michigan this fall to pursue her PhD in biodiversity.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Lewis & Clark $705,000 to develop a Teaching Excellence Program, a coordinated program that will support faculty in the exploration, systematic study, and targeted enhancement of their classroom teaching. The award follows a previous Mellon grant to support undergraduate research in the arts and humanities.

A team of five Lewis & Clark students have qualified for the final rounds of the 2016 Cleantech Challenge. The competition, held at Portland State University, invites student entrepreneurs to showcase their inventions and compete for a $10,000 grand prize.

The pursuit of a better understanding of how the brain grows and functions is the goal of Tamily Weissman-Unni’s research laboratory. Weissman has been named a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award that will support her research and teaching over the next five years.

Karissa Tom B.A. ’16 is the first Lewis & Clark alumnus to secure a John Lewis Fellowship through the international nonprofit organization Humanity in Action. She joins her colleagues from Europe and the United States in Atlanta this summer.

Five seniors and six recent alumni will spend the next year overseas after receiving prestigious awards from the Fulbright Program. Lewis & Clark is one of the top producers of Fulbright award winners in the country.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has awarded Religious Studies Professor Robert Kugler a ﻿grant﻿ for his project, “Discovering Legal Pluralism: Toward a New Understanding of the Jews of Hellenistic Egypt.” Competition for an ACLS fellowship is intense: just six percent of this year’s nearly 1,100 applications received funding.

A lawsuit was recently lodged by youth plaintiffs against the federal government for failing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. In an interview with Michael Castner on KXL-FM radio,Professor Michael Blumm explains the reasoning of the magistrate judges’ decision to uphold the standing and claims.

Eve Lowenstein B.A. ’17 is one of just 252 scholars selected from a field of 1,150 students nominated by 415 institutions nationwide. Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships are widely considered the preeminent awards for undergraduates preparing for science careers. Irene Duba B.A. ’17 garnered an honorable mention.

After graduating magna cum laude with a degree in sociology/anthropology in 2010, Haben Girma entered Harvard Law School as its first deaf-blind student, earning her J.D. in 2014. Now a staff attorney at Disability Rights Advocates, Girma works to provide free legal representation to people with disabilities whose civil rights have been violated.

Lewis & Clark’s first-ever Day of Giving was a great success with a total of 1,753 gifts collected between 12:01 a.m. and midnight on Tuesday, April 5. The donations totaling $172,120 unlocked the $100,000 match for a grand total of $272,120.